糖心视频

We鈥檙e starting to see where all that dry powder is going.

After a relatively quiet year on the private markets, venture firms are getting back into the funding game.聽, a long-standing venture capital firm,听聽for seed-stage startups, according to .

This isn鈥檛 a bad strategy for the prolific venture firm, which was an early investor in聽,听听补苍诲听. The funding market is currently at a standstill as startups, in an urge to preserve their current sky-high valuations, are reluctant to raise down-rounds. Since investors aren鈥檛 willing to shell out funding at current value, funding news has been relatively quiet compared to the heyday of 2021.

But investing in seed-stage startups gives venture firms like Sequoia a chance to invest at market rate, without the baggage that has plagued the private market in 2022.

This new fund is a chance for Sequoia to dip its toes back into the funding stream, after a rough 2022. The firm had to send an apology letter to investors for its FTX crypto investment (which ended up聽). Sequoia, which holds stock in many of its now-public investments, also saw stock prices tumble:聽聽is sharing 41% lower than when it debuted, while聽聽is sharing 71% lower than its debut stock price.

Some of that $195 million will be funneled into Arc, Sequoia鈥檚 seven-week long accelerator program that teaches first-time founders how to build a company. Arc started in 2022 with two batches, but in 2023 the firm plans to run three cycles and give each seed-stage company no more than $1 million to participate.

Firms like Sequoia聽are entering 2023 with around $1.3 trillion in dry powder, but without anywhere to go in a precipitous financial market. It鈥檒l be interesting to see new solutions VCs build to remain active.

Illustration: Dom Guzman